The Casual Vacancy by J. K. Rowling

[lemming]

Does realistic equal bleak? Sometimes when reading this book I felt Rowling has something in common with her character Stuart Wall whose "slumming it" by seeking out "authentic" experiences-- such as unprotected sex with a junkie's daughter--is a reflection of his search for "true authenticity" - "this, he knew, was real life." Rowling's determination to write about real life and move beyond her roots in fantasy makes me think of a child who consciously makes herself the polar opposite of her parents and is therefore still under their influence. Sometimes Rowling's story seems to exist only to connect the dots between every disturbing issue imaginable, and I do wonder how much firsthand experience she has with some of these issues.

For instance, I may not know much about injecting heroin but I know a bit about SQL injection because I work as a web programmer, and from the descriptions of hacks used to access the council website to make defamatory posts about various characters, I got the vibe that the author was fuzzy on how hacking into a website would work, but had read a Wikipedia article about it.

"It did not take very long for her to retrieve a site that gave explicit instructions for the simplest form of SQL injection. Then she brought up the Parish Council website. It took her five minutes to hack the site, and then only because she had transcribed the code wrong the first time." Fair enough, this character is not meant to be highly computer literate, or indeed highly intelligent, so maybe she wouldn't have thought to copy paste the code, but the "simplest form of SQL injection" would be something like "'x' or -", so not many characters to get wrong, even if she is meant to be dyslexic. And then "to her astonishment, she discovered that whoever was administering the site had not removed the user details of The_Ghost_of_Barry_Fairbrother from the database, but merely deleted the post. It would be child's play, therefore, to post in the same name." Um, ok I guess if the SQL injection allowed her to login she would probably end up signed in as the first person in the user table, and maybe that's likely to be the admin user, who apparently has the ability to post as any other user in the database... maybe, but pretty advanced functionality for what is supposed to be a very unsophisticated website.

It may seem like I am nit-picking for the sake of it, but the description of something I know about made me wonder how realistic the other stuff was, which made Rowling's efforts to confront her audience with a barrage of bleak issues feel a bit contrived to me. Rowling is a good writer, but hopefully she can outgrow her idea that bleak equals mature, which was evident in the Harry Potter series as well as this new book for adults.

[Fran]

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